Sustainable urban development requires a reconfiguration of the traditional processes towards a new approach that raises the question of the integration of environmental data in the design, as well as the evaluation of urban projects. This new approach implies to manage heterogeneous parameters and to improve concertation processes. Therefore, the place of the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in such a process has to be questioned. In the first section, this paper explores the issue of the sustainability indicators. The results of a survey are presented and discussed. This survey of urban research stackeholders highlighted their various waitings for GIS tools, and the complexity of the set of problems. The description of benefits and limits of GIS in this context is discussed in the second section.